Philosophies around "pretty" HTML emails vs. plain text emails

[Anonymous]

I've been in a four-year debate with myself around whether our marketing emails should be mainly "pretty" HTML that reinforce our brand, and plain text emails that appear to come from a person.

Here's where I've settled:

1) Our weekly thought-leadership centered content campaigns come from our brand (Corporate Visions), look pretty, and can have formatted text.

2) Nurturing emails (when we're trying to draw a lead into a sales cycle) come from a specific person (lead owner) and are plain text with a video image link (found that to be a best practice).

3) Small-group event invitations are plain text, similar to #2.

4) Large-group conference events are fancy, from the brand, look pretty and showcase the "theme" of the event.

I've noticed that plain text emails tend to have around 0.3% of so higher click-rates, but... I feel like I'm willing to sacrifice that for developing a bit of brand recognition. I've noticed that Marketo doesn't shy away from sending emails from their brand and with a splash of purple.

What are other folks out there doing?

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeannie--I 'm also curious about what people are doing. I've used a formula simialr to what you described above. For lead nurturing and small-group invitations, I sometimes use a mix. Maybe the first lead nurturing email is plain text and appears to come from a rep, but I might include a few in the cycle that are HTML. Likewise with the small events--maybe the first is HTML, but the registration reminder is plain text and appears to come from a rep. 

[Anonymous]

I've done something similar...and also mixed things up a bit.

We use the text-base emails sparingly, for a few reasons.
1. We don't want people to get saturated with these and stop clicking on them
2. We don't want them to conflict with Sales Insight emails our team may be sending out
3. We want to make them seem as personal as possible.

For events, we use a mix of things -- most of our emails are branded and from a corporate address. However, one or two may be special invites or "Forwards" from an exec. We find this approach to be very effective. 

We also try to vet it out with our sales folks to make sure they aren't sending a batch out via Sales Insight that may conflict with an email "from" them.

[Anonymous]

Interesting thread, this is something I've also been thinking of a lot lately. 

I've found that corporate branded HTML emails have had much worse open and CT rates than emails that appear to come from a real person. 

Our strategy recently has been almost entirely based on personalized, plain text emails that are meant to replicate as much as possible a sense of 1-1 communication -- this is for both promotions, thought leadership, product updates, etc.. 

This raises an obvious challenge in terms of the possibility of conflicting messages from the rep, but I tend to also use other figures in the company as email personas for various purposes which reduces that potential. 

I really do feel that people want to build relationships with other people, not with brands, which is why this strategy is effective. 

I am wanting to experiment with a glossier HTML format for some of our content pieces to see if this helps merchanidse it a bit more.